Mint tea and WTF I got sanctimommied

GB, first thing in the morning: I'm sad.

Me: Why are you sad, honey?

GB: Because we're not a superhero family.

Because of the 11-year-old, our house is full of Percy Jackson, manga, comic books, and violent graphic novels—stuff I might not otherwise have in the house yet. I catch GB pretending to be a zombie, his arms in front of him, wrists hanging down, stomping in a circle and shouting, "March! March! March for blood!"

GB puts his blue plastic chopsticks in my face, telling me he's going to get my nose.

We don't put pokey things in people's faces, I say. Why do you think that is?

Because they could hurt them, he says.

That's right. What could they hurt?

GB thinks.

I point at my eyes. Here's a hint, I say. Your eyes are very important. What can you do with them?

Roll them, he says.

Touché, kid. Touché.

***

We're at the playground in Dolores Park. Gargantubaby is heading to the top of the tall slide, so I head for the bottom to watch him. I stop in the middle of the stairway, shaded by a tree. Above me, at the top, I see an adult woman: skinny black jeans, good shoes, black tank top, fashionable blue-and-white-striped mask, expensive sunglasses. She's waiting, amid the children, to go down the slide. Gargantubaby cuts in front of her, swinging under the railing.

When she makes a "what the hell" gesture at his little back, I know we're in trouble.

GB goes down the slide. I suppose the woman goes down after him—I'm not really paying much attention to her yet—because at some point they’re both at the bottom. Predictably, GB makes his famous move of trying to climb back up the slide. Another kid is coming down fast, so I yell his name: "GB, GB, GB, GB." But I'm hidden, so he doesn't hear me. Nobody does.

But, as it turns out, I can hear them.

"Is that your kid?" the woman says to a man standing near her. He's holding an infant.

"No," he says defensively, as in I WOULD NEVER LET MY KID DO THAT. "This is my kid." They move a little closer, bonding over what a shit my kid is and, by extension, what a shit his absent mother must be.

I stare at the woman. A primal rage percolates. She looks around. Eventually, her expensive sunglasses find the heat of my eyes. She pauses when she sees me staring down at her from beneath the tree. She calls up, AND I QUOTE: "Is that yours?"

Light years away, a black hole implodes. Suns shoot in every direction; planets form. Everything happens very quickly, and very slowly.

"Is 'that' mine?" I repeat. Surely this human will not use the word "that" again to refer to my child if I indicate I will damage her if she does so.

"Yes," Sanctimommy says, infused by the power of her righteousness. "Is that yours?"

I pause. Oceans swell, magma rises to the earth's crust, bubbles over, cools, and forms land.

"Yes," I say.

I have a policy. It's pretty strict: I don't get into it with other moms, at least about mom things. I especially don't get into it with other moms on the playground. I stare at Sanctimommy, wondering if just this once, I can break my policy so I can break her face.

"Just so you know," she says OH NO SHE DIDN'T YES SHE DID, "he has been trying to crawl up the slide" HE HAS NOT "BEEN TRYING TO" HE DID IT ONCE I'VE BEEN STANDING HERE THE WHOLE TIME "and there are kids coming down" THERE ARE ALWAYS KIDS COMING DOWN IT'S A PLAYGROUND. "We're just worried about his safety."

THE FUCK YOU ARE YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT ANY RIP TO THE TIGHT-ASSED FABRIC OF THE WHITE SANCTIPARENTS' ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR CODE SEE PAGE 128 OF MY NEW BOOK IN A SECTION ENTITLED "SANTICPARENTS: DIE, DIE, DIE.”

I say nothing. I continue staring. Perhaps unnerved by my refusal to engage, she walks away. 

"I just got sanctimommy'ed hard, like classic," I say to SJ, who's sitting sleepily on a bench with the backpack. "GB was doing his thing of climbing back up the slide."

In front of us, GB slides down a different slide, continuing his classic move and getting accosted by more much younger, much richer parents who give a fuck about kids bonking into each other.

"It would be a full-time job to keep kids from climbing back up slides," SJ says.

"She should get a fold-out chair and set up shop," I say. We giggle, bonding over our shared hatred of sanctiparents. We're sitting right next to the entrance to the park. Suddenly Sanctimommy wanders toward us, hands in her sanctipockets.

"Oh, she BETTER not come over here and try to talk to me," I murmur, turning my head to drink from my liter of sparkling water. "Oh my god. She doesn't have a kid with her! SJ! She's not even a parent!"

I realize then that I haven't seen her with a kid or even another adult, and the way she leaves the playground—not carrying a single bag, not carrying ANYTHING, looking at the sky, walking slowly, not looking for her kid who might at that very moment be choking or drowning somewhere—is raising the question WHY IS SHE IN THE PLAYGROUND and, more importantly, WHAT WAS SHE DOING ON THE SLIDE.

"That's her?" says SJ. "Hmm."

I swallow. "What," I say.

"Nothing. OK. It's just that she walked by earlier, and you're dressed exactly the same. So for a second I thought it was you."

***

I'm trying to have a conversation with a friend on the phone. It's bedtime and GB runs into the room naked with his finger between his butt cheeks.

GB: I stuck my finger in my butthole! I stuck my finger in my butthole!

My friend: Sounds like you need to get that.

Me: Yep.

GB wants to read books, but I want to get us out of the house to go to the grocery store.

"We'll do a compromise," I say. "I'll read you one book and then we'll brush teeth."

"OK!" GB says, the way he always says OK at the beginning of a compromise.

After one book, I say, "OK, let's brush teeth!"

As expected, he says, "No! Draw first."

"That was our compromise," I say hopelessly. "One story and then brush teeth."

GB furrows his brow and sits in his little chair near his drawing stuff in protest.

"The sign," he says, "says, 'No brushing teeth on this land.'"

(There is no sign.)

GB warbles as he sings to himself so he sounds like Billie Holiday. I love hearing him sing. He's trying so hard to sound pretty it breaks my heart. 

Sometimes GB wants to read catalogs at bedtime, so we sit together, and, at his demand, I read description after description such as, "Halloween starts here! Welcome to your one-stop spooky shop, where 1000s of unique finds lurk around every corner—all at our LOWEST PRICES GUARANTEED!"

One night SJ and I play Scrabble with Stepdaughter. SJ plays BEEF. On his next turn, all he has is QEEYOII so he plays BEEFY.

Maybe you had to be there, but that kind of shit can make me giggle for days.

BEEFY.

(Also I got a double-letter and double-word score for NOONER, so I was in a good mood.)

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A few weeks ago, SJ came home from the farmers market with a huge bouquet of mint. At first I was like, "Amazing! Beautiful! Smells great! What the fuck are we going to do with all that mint? Am I going to be throwing it away in a week?" Etc. But then SJ started dropping leaves in our ongoing pot of black tea, and, as he said, it really "opens it up. Like, it does something different to it."

It does. The next time you see mint, I recommend buying a bunch and dropping some leaves into your tea. The Mediterranean region is onto something.